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Hard to believe that my last post here was almost 6 months ago. Though the cliché about time flying when you are having fun would seem appropriate, it wouldn’t exactly be accurate in this case. The past 6 months have been…well…weird. Some great experiences to be sure, including some amazing travel opportunities through my work with the OECD to Japan, Italy and Morocco. Decisions were made about what I would be doing in 2016, and though I was offered an opportunity to stay in Paris at the OECD for at least another year I decided for a number of reasons that I would instead return to Canada at the end of my contract in January. Then I wound up flat on my back. Literally.

At the end of October, after getting back to Paris from a fairly intense 6 weeks of travel, I started suffering from my severe lower back pain. While I have dealt with this type of thing before from time to time, this felt different. Normally after about a week or so it would ease up, but this time it wasn’t and the intensity was unlike anything I had experienced before. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t sleep. Doing even the most basic things – like getting dressed – was torture. After seeing some doctors and getting an MRI the diagnosis was that it was a herniated disk in my lower spine that was pushing on a nerve. The good news (relatively speaking) was that I likely wouldn’t need surgery, however I was told it would take 2-3 months for it to fully heal and get back to normal.

By this point it was late November and I had gone through a month of spending essentially 23+ hours a day stuck inside my apartment in Paris. It was looking like it would be at least until Christmas before I was starting to be more functional again, with a decent margin of uncertainty around that. Thus I made the relatively big decision very quickly to end my contract early and head back to Canada to finish my recovery at home. Decision was made on a Tuesday and I was in Saskatoon by Thursday night; there is something to be said for travelling light.

Six weeks later I am happy to report that I am feeling much better. While I wouldn’t say I am 100% back to normal yet, it is without doubt a significant improvement from where I was at in November. Going through this experience I couldn’t help think of this bit by my favourite comedian Louis CK – just change “ankle” for “back” and it pretty much hits the nail on the head:

In the midst of all this, November also saw Paris hit again by the ugly spectre of terrorism. I was safe in my apartment when the rampage began, though the attack hit close to home for me in a more metaphorical sense. Having been in Paris for almost a year, this kind of atrocity feels different when it happens in a city whose streets I have now walked and whose people I now know much better. One of the restaurants that was attacked by gunmen – Café Bonne Bière – I had sat at just a few weeks earlier on a Friday evening with good friends of mine from Ottawa and their young daughter whom were visiting. One of my closest friends in Paris had been out at one of the other cafes that was attacked that same evening – fate had her leave just a couple hours before the gunman went on their rampage. Most people I talked to in Paris were no more than one or two degrees of separation away from someone who was directly impacted by the attacks. It was a strange bookend of my time in Paris, with the Charlie Hebdo attack in January happening just days after my arrival and this latest one happening just days before my departure.

So what now? On a practical level, I don’t start work back in Ottawa with the federal government until April 1, thus I’ve got almost three months yet of unscheduled time ahead of me which is a unique gift. I have a few personal projects that have been kicking around for quite some time (one of which the origins go back to this post from 2013) which I am hoping to make some progress on. I’m using Saskatoon as my home base for the time being, but I’ll probably travel a bit over the next few months to visit some family, exact plans as of yet TBD. Before long I will need to start preparing in earnest for my reintegration into life in Ottawa, including finding a place to live.

I also need some time and mental space to reflect. For the past few years I have used this blog to occasionally share and reflect on both my experiences but also some of my thoughts and feelings on life’s journey. It isn’t always a comfortable thing to do, but I think it is a useful one. I described 2013 as my most difficult year to date. 2014 I talked about as a year that set the stage for the next act. Thinking back on 2015 I can probably best describe it as an “apéritif” year, one the cleanses the palate and stimulates the appetite. It was an amazing year, don’t get me wrong, with opportunities that included travelling to 10 countries and 5 continents over the course of the year. Moving to France, exploring life in Paris including some wonderful people from around the world that I met, and the professional opportunities for growth and learning through my work with the OECD were all great experiences. But it always felt temporary, never quite like I was home in any sense of the word – hence the “apéritif year”.

The main course, I suspect, is yet to come.

*Those who know me will know that I consider The West Wing to be the greatest TV series ever created. I have claimed before that anything smart I know about politics I learnt from watching that show, something I probably still agree with (seasoned with some practical experience in the intervening 15 years). “What’s next?” was fictional President Bartlett’s catch-phrase, said not out of fear or anxiety but as a signal that he was ready to move on to the next issue that required his attention (though no doubt it still contained a hint of double entendre to it). It struck me as quite appropriate for this update on many levels.

Last week I geeked out a bit on the New Horizons mission to Pluto, however I felt that a post updating on life in Paris was in order as well. This past week marked the halfway point in my contract with the OECD. Talking with a few friends and family back home recently they remarked their surprise as to how time flies. And while in part I agree with that, it equally feels to me like I have been here for MUCH longer than 6 1/2 months.

In part that feeling is no doubt because a lot has happened in this relatively short period of time. Aside from the adjustment to a very different environment, including a new job in a new organization, I’ve also had the chance to travel more than I expected and thus get a glimpse of a number of new places. Since my last update I had the opportunity to spend a few days in Amsterdam and then a few weeks later zip across the Atlantic to spend a couple of days in Quito, Ecuador where I was presenting on open data at a conference of Supreme Audit Institutions.

I’m now enjoying a period of about two months of uninterrupted time in Pairs itself, which is a blessing in that I feel like this past while I haven’t really had much of a chance to explore the city itself. There is a pretty steady trickle of visitors coming through Paris over the next couple of months (one of the benefits of living in one of the big international cities of the world); it will be good to see some familiar faces and a great excuse to get out and explore a bit more.

So what’s next? Already the next few months are starting to fill up. I’m going to be making a short trip to Germany at the end of August, followed by a return to Slovakia in September and then a much bigger voyage to Japan at the end of September for one of the major projects I am working on. There will likely be family coming for a visit in the fall, and perhaps a few friends as well. By that time, I will be well on my way to having to make some decisions as to my answer to the question “what’s next”. As is often the case in life, there will no doubt be some different paths that present themselves. For now, the best I can do is try enjoy the moment and follow my gut when the time comes.

Something a lot of people, even people who know me very well, probably don’t know about me: I’m a bit of a closet space geek. I’ve been a science fiction fan for as long as I can remember, and as a child of the 80s grew up on Star Trek, Star Wars, and the rest of the usual sci-fi classics of my generation (and of course readers of this blog will know that in recent years I have become a pretty big Dr. Who fan). I would always pick up sci-fi novels when I was a teenager, and I particularly remember loving the Foundation series by Asimov. But beyond Sci-Fi I was always interested in the actual science behind space, and still remember finding books in my elementary school library about rocketry, quantum physics, and space exploration which I devoured (or at least tried to, most of it was way over my head). I built and flew model rockets. I even went to “space camp” a couple times.

We probably all remember at least some of our answers to what we wanted to be when we grew up. There were 4 distinct phases to mine: Ghostbuster (until I realized that I am actually pretty scared of ghosts) followed by Paleontologist (until I realized that digging in the dirt VERY slowly isn’t actually that much fun) followed by what I am going to rather inexactly call “space dude”. Astronaut is of course always a sexy job, but I was realistic even at that age that I didn’t exactly have the body type of a test pilot. Being a rocket scientist sounded pretty good as well, and I remember some pretty serious day dreams in my pre-teen years of pursuing something in the engineering or science realms related to space. However those dreams soon enough came crashing back to Earth (pardon the pun) with the following realization: I neither am very good at, nor very much enjoy, math. And that appeared to be pretty much a career limiting move when it comes to the space sciences.

Thus I eventually settled on my last, best destiny: public policy. However over the last number of years I’ve realized that there is actually an overlap in my professional pursuits and my childhood interests in that space policy is not only a thing, but arguably an increasingly important one. Though my day job for much of the past decade has focused on a very different type of intersection between technology and public policy, I still love reading and learning about all things space related.

So I have been following with great interest the big year for space exploration that has been happening with the first visits to some of the more inaccessible reaches of our solar system. First there was the landing in November of the Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the first ever “soft” landing on a comet (“soft” being in quotation marks as it ended up being a bit of a bumpy ride). Then the Dawn spacecraft using a remarkable ion propulsion system became the first ever spacecraft to orbit two different extraterrestrial bodies when it entered into orbit around Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Amongst other things, it discovered the enigmatic “bright spots” on Ceres’ surface which have still yet to be explained.

However for most people the main attraction of the 2014/15 space exploration season is taking place as we speak. The New Horizons spacecraft which launched from Earth some 9 1/2 years ago, is about to reach Pluto with it’s closest approach taking place in just a few hours at 7:49am EST July 14th. This is the first time we will have ever seen Pluto up close, the last of the major bodies in our Solar System to receive a visit from us humans. The Voyager era was before my time, so this is really the first time in my lifetime that we are getting to experience the thrill of newly exploring a major body in our solar system. Up until a few weeks ago, Pluto and its moons were nothing but a few pixels in even our best telescopes. But now with even just the preliminary images we are starting to get a fascinating look at this previously unknown world.

Image of Pluto taken by New Horizons on July 12 from a distance of 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers). Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

For those who are interested in learning more about the New Horizons mission and following it as starts sending back data from its flyby, by far the best resource I have come across is Emily Lakdawalla’s blog on Planetary.org. Start with her “What to expect when you’re expecting a flyby” post and you can follow the breadcrumbs from there. I also have a Twitter list of over 100 space peeps which I have been slowly building which will provide you with a pretty good live look at what is going on as many of them are following the final approach to the Pluto system at the mission control centre.

Aside from the hard science of the mission, Pluto holds a special place in our collective psyche and expect to see some more light-hearted takes on this new chapter of space exploration. Earlier this week I stumbled upon this music video tribute to Pluto which aside from being fun and catchy, is actually also surprisingly touching:

As the high-resolution images start coming in over the next few days, no doubt Pluto will be gracing newscasts and newspapers around the globe. In fact this is likely to be one of the highest profile moments for space exploration we have seen in many years. Which I think is more than a little sad.

All that to say, there are some amazing things happening right now in the realm of space exploration. Yet not only is the public awareness of what is happening in this field shockingly low, but so too is government support. For example, spending on space programs make up just a fraction of what is spent on the military. With some quick Wikipedia research, here is a snapshot of how annual expenditures compare in the top ten spending countries on space vs. their military expenditures for the most recent years available.

My point being this: so many amazing things are happening in the field of space exploration in spite of the remarkably low levels of funding, just imagine what could be done if for example we collectively doubled humanities’ spending on space programs by re-purposing a few percentage points of military spending to the peaceful exploration of our cosmic neighbourhood. The breadth and speed at which our reach, knowledge, and experience as a species would increase would be staggering. Moments like the New Horizons mission remind us that we are living in the future; but that future won’t last long if our public policy priorities don’t follow.

“We all change. When you think about it, we are all different people all through our lives and that’s okay, that’s good, you’ve got to keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be.”
– The Doctor, Dr. Who, The Time of the Doctor

Last week I got to start a new line on my Life Calendar (for those who aren’t familiar with my Life Calendar project, see here and here for the back-story). Since my last update to this project, the boxes have changed colour, a new city is on the right-hand margin, and another “Dr. Who moment” has been added.

So what have I done with those 21 new squares on the calendar? I’ve moved across the Atlantic and made significant progress on the adjustment process to my new (even if in the grand scheme of things, temporary) home in Paris. I have met dozens, if not hundreds, of new people from literally every corner of the globe – among them some wonderful colleagues and a diverse set of new friends. I’ve had the opportunity both through work and personally to start travelling throughout Europe with trips to Slovakia, Northern Ireland, London, and within France to the Champaign region (with a stop to see the impressive cathedral of Remis) and to the Medieval Disneyland that is Provins, while of course continuing to explore the amazing city that is Paris. I’ve had the pleasure over the past few months to host a couple of friends and also my father who made an extended visit in April (my tour guide skills are getting better by the day – in the 3 1/2 weeks my father was here we estimated we did about 150KMs of walking the streets of Paris and London!). I also made a trip back to North America to attend my 5-year reunion at the Harvard Kennedy School for a weekend of reconnecting with the many amazing people I shared that time with, and years worth of catching-up and hugs squeezed into a few days. Last, but not least, I’ve continued to broaden my professional horizons through my work at the OECD in gaining a better understanding of how digital government initiatives are unfolding across the globe and starting to move forward on a few projects that will help countries accelerate their progress.

Of course I would be remiss to leave this update at that; guilty of what in the social media era is best known as “selective sharing“. Yes there have been amazing moments over the past 5 months, but there have been some tough ones too. In what has become a common reflection amongst other ex-pats I have talked with, it gets harder the older you get to just pack up your life and start fresh. It’s a unique sensation to suddenly find yourself on your own living somewhere you know virtually no one; family, friends, and even familiar memories an ocean away. As I am starting to discover, it strengthens you in ways that you weren’t even aware needed strengthening.

Well it has been almost two months since my inaugural post from Paris. Despite good intentions, I haven’t been able to find the time to sit down and put virtual pen to virtual paper on a proper post. Thankfully I never had any clearly committed to posting schedule, thus I will take inspiration from one of my favourite blogs which has just recently updated its posting schedule from “New Posts Every Tuesday” to “New Posts Every Sometimes”…sounds about right!

As always, for those interested in what I am up to as part of my European adventures, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are the best ways to keep up with my goings on. The long and the short of it: life is good.

Sometime in February I crossed the threshold when moving to a new city where one goes from feeling like a tourist to feeling like I actually live here (if not quite yet at home). It’s a good place to be at coming up on my third month here and I’m feeling more and more settled and comfortable in Paris. The language barrier in day-to-day life is something that I’m conscious of, but my rudimentary (and hopefully slowly improving) French, combined with the occasional need for an impromptu game of Charades, has been enough to navigate most situations. There have been a lot of little differences I’ve noticed in daily life here; in fact that is a blog post in and of itself that I plan to write at some point. However on balance most of the little differences fall into either the “good” or “interesting” category and I can say 2 1/2 months into this journey that I am very happy that I took this particular leap of faith.

Work started to kick into high-gear over the past month and I have to say that I am grateful for the opportunities to travel and learn that this position is affording me. I am currently working on projects related to public governance reforms in both Northern Ireland and Slovakia. Over the past month I have had the opportunity to travel to Belfast and Bratislava to learn first-hand about their systems of government and work with their officials to help identify areas for improvement, specifically in my case in the realm of what we call digital government. I’m also working on a number of broader projects with our OECD member countries in the realm of digital government, taking a particular focus on our work on best practices in government use of social media. Last month I co-authored a blog post with a colleague of mine titled “Measuring Government Impact in a Social Media World” which builds on some research that our team published late last year. We got some good online traction from the blog post and even a few mediaarticles in Chile.

So that’s it for now! I will wish you all well and leave you with a few pictures from my travels over the past month and my continuing exploration of Paris.

Belfast

My colleague Jeremy took some amazing pictures from our time in Belfast which you can find at this link (I’m sharing with his permission as they put anything I took to shame!)

I will only add to his great collection a shot of the very impressive Titanic Museum that I had a chance to visit on the Saturday morning before I flew back to Paris, along with the scale model so you can see how big the actual ship was compared to the museum (each corner of the museum is the same size as the bow of the ship):

Bratislava

The “UFO Bridge”:

Panoramic view of the Slovakian Parliament and the Bratislava Castle:

View of the Slovakian Parliament from the front steps:

I don’t know what these are actually called, but I call them “Slovakia Sticks” and they were great! 🙂

Pairs:

The small-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty at the Point de Grenelle near my apartment:

Speaking of my neighbourhood, some poetry on the metro by the writer/poet that my street is named after:

It has been almost three weeks since I arrived in Paris, and what a remarkable time it has been so far. The first weekend I was here, as I was trying to shake off my jet lag and explore this new city, the title for this blog post instantly jumped into my mind. Paris is a city of immense beauty. Literally around every corner is something remarkable, and as someone who has always enjoyed reflective walks at night it occurred to me on my very first of those walks in Paris that I may have found myself in the best city in the world for such an activity! But it would be disingenuous of me not to address the elephant in the room first.

When I got on the plane in Saskatoon the morning of January 2nd I couldn’t have begun to image how the world’s gaze would be on Paris just a few days later, so tragically for reasons of violence and hatred. Mine is a generation who have known international violence and terror in a way that Canadians haven’t for a long time. Terrorism is, almost by its very definition, shocking. It is designed to disrupt normal life and force everyone to pay attention. 9/11 happened while I was still an undergraduate student at Carleton University. I still remember how I felt that morning and that uneasy sense that the world was changing, that we were at one of those points that would divide events into “before” and “after”, and the pit in our collective stomachs waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It is remarkable the number of people I know in my life who served or were involved in some way in the Afghanistan war. During my time at the Harvard Kennedy School I met so many more American friends who were impacted by their involvement in the Iraq war. Having lived in Boston for two years the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 hit me in a personal way, particularly as I was checking social media constantly that day to make sure that those friends still living there were okay. Three months ago I was on the receiving end of that concern from family and friends when the shooting took place in Ottawa that killed a Canadian Forces honour guard at the tomb of the unknown solder and led to a gun battle in the halls of Parliament. Then on morning of January 7th of this year, just four days after arriving in Paris, news started filtering out about the horrific attacks at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. More violence would follow in the days after as all of France, indeed much of the world, held its collective breath as the manhunt for the gunmen raged and culminated in the hostage stand-offs that took place two days later.

I shared some thoughts with Saskatoon radio station 650 CKOM in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo which you can listen to here. While I have had some more time to process everything that has happened, I still ultimately feel the same way I did when I gave the interview: life goes on. Indeed it occurs to me that in some ways this is nothing new, and every generation faces their own demons. Today acts of horror in our world get amplified given the instant interconnectedness that technology brings us, but they have always been with us and it is important not to forget that in so many important ways the world is in fact getting better.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t unnerving to now see police and soldiers with assault rifles patrolling the streets of Paris. However, one of the great strengths and weaknesses of the human condition is that our memories are short, and even now I get a sense that things are starting to move back to a sense of normality. In the face of such madness all that can really be done is to go on and live our lives, stay vigilant of course, and perhaps most importantly, try to do what we can to make the world a little bit of a better place.

That is after all why I am here (The OECD‘s slogan is “Better Policies for Better Lives”). This has always promised to be an incredible professional and personal opportunity for growth, and the past few weeks have only reinforced that for me. In many ways I feel like I have had little more than a glimpse of Paris since I got here, but if there was one word for me to describe this place it is “magical”. After the intensity that always accompanies a move to a new city, I’m starting to feel settled. I’ve met new colleagues and friends from literally dozens of countries, and have begun to enjoy the pleasures, both simple and grand, of life in Paris and this new experience. There is so much more to come, and I look forward to sharing this journey with you!

I will leave you with just a few images from my walks in the City of Lights so far (P.S. I’ve started using my Instagram account more regularly, so for those who are on it follow me for my latest photos from my time here). Unlike some things in life, I can truly say that the great monuments and sights of Paris are so much more impressive in person than a picture can hope to capture.

In just a few days I am going to be taking this next leap in my life’s journey, moving to Paris for at least the next year to work on digital government issues for the OECD. This is an incredibly exciting opportunity and I think will prove to be quite an adventure professionally and personally.

Preparing for this kind of a transition is obviously an opportunity to pause and reflect. All the more so with it being the holidays and New Year’s Eve upon us, a time of year I have always found full of self-reflection. Last year at this time I posted about my reflections on 2013, which I described as the toughest year of my life to date. I predicted that 2014 would see me move into a new phase of life professionally and personally, which proved to be true even if not in the ways that I expected (but then again, when does life ever unfold in the ways that we expect).

2014 was very much about setting the stage for the next act. I had to make some choices at various points throughout the year to close certain doors in my life, often without knowing which ones would open up in turn. My family and I went through the difficult experience of losing my step-mother to cancer this fall. There were real moments of joy this year as well, and many reasons to celebrate victories, births, and important milestones of those in my life. More than anything, when I look back on 2014 it strikes me as a year where I learnt more about myself.

One of the exercises that I started in 2014 was creating a “life calendar”. For those who have been following this blog (or my Facebook or Twitter feeds) you may have read a bit about this project of mine. I’ve done some further refinement of my life calendar since my last post in September, and I’m happy to share with you the fruits of my labours:

You will notice the yellow squares with numbers I’ve added throughout my timeline. Those represent major transitions in my life, or as I have come to think of them, my “Dr. Who moments” (bare with me for a moment and I will circle back to explain what that means). These are major transition points in my life which launched significantly new chapters. They were all instigated by a career change, a move to a new city, or in many cases both. They also involved having new people become a part of my life, and in many cases having to say goodbye to others. Arguably only #1 and #6 were truly transformational, with everything in-between being smaller chapters within the same narrative arc. A new number is going to be added to the calendar next week, and I am fairly confident that #8 will fall into the “truly transformational” category.

Which brings me to Dr. Who. Last year around this time thanks to the magic of Netflix I started watching the modern seasons of Dr. Who (starting from the 2005 re-boot), the British sci-fi series that has been running for over 50 years. For those who have never seen it, the central character, the Doctor as he is known, is a Time Lord that travels through time and space having frequent madcap adventures while saving the universe. While the Doctor is for practical purposes immortal (though not completely), if he is fatally injured he goes through a process of “regeneration” where he takes on a new physical appearance. Through this convenient plot device there have been 12 different actors who have played the Doctor since 1963.

Predictably, I loved Dr. Who and ended up gobbling up all 8 seasons of the modern re-boot in fairly short order. Immersing myself in it, I soon realized that beyond the sci-fi plot lines there is a deeper metaphor being explored throughout the Dr. Who series. To me, it speaks to the nature of the journey that is our lives. How the journey itself changes us and we can appear, at least to others, to become different people at different points along the way. How some people travel with us for part of the journey (the Doctor often has a travelling companion), even sometimes through multiple regenerations, but more often than we would like through choice or circumstance our travelling companions have to take different paths.

The best expression of this metaphor in the series is the final episode of David Tennant’s run as the Doctor, titled “The End of Time”. Throughout the episode he knows due to a prophecy that he will soon be needing to regenerate and struggles with moving on to this next phase of his journey:

Later in the episode, after he is critically injured and knows that he only has a little time left before he regenerates into the next Doctor, he takes some quick trips through time and space to say goodbye to the people that were closest to him through his most recent travels (the clip below captures the last couple of these goodbyes; unfortunately I can’t find one with the full scene):

The past month I have spent a lot of time saying my own goodbyes to the people that have been important to me these past few years. I’m truly excited about the journey ahead, but I would be lying if I said that there weren’t moments of pause in the realization that this really is the start of something new, and everything that means.

So as I begin this new chapter, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to blog more regularly, in part to keep my friends, family and colleagues updated on my Paris adventures. If you are interested, I’d encourage you to to sign-up for email updates from my blog through the subscription box below:

Those who follow me on Twitter or Facebook may know that about two months ago I bought a “Life Calendar” from the wonderful blog “Wait But Why” (and specifically, inspired by this blog post). After putting down $15 and waiting a few weeks, I had my very own 2 foot by 3 foot life calendar.

There are 52 boxes across the horizontal axis (one for every week of the year) and 90 rows down the vertical axis (one for every year of a 90 year life – above the average, but still a reasonably achievable goal). That’s it. Your entire life graphed on one piece of paper. I have to admit, unrolling it for the first time, tacking it to the wall, and stepping back and looking at it was an interesting mix of humility, inspiration, and terror.

Over the past month I have had some (unexpected) time for reflection and to work on a few projects that I have had kicking around, including this one. I decided to take a first crack at visualizing the contours of my life using the calendar as my canvas. I must admit that I underestimated how much time it would take to actually remember/research my life down to the granularity of week-by-week and convert it to calendar that starts on May 28th, decide what to include on the calendar and how to represent it in a meaningful way, and then put pen/marker to paper.

The fruits of my labours, what I am going to call the “beta version” of my Life Calendar, is below along with a rough legend to help you make a bit of sense of the colour scheme:

A few explanatory notes, followed by a some initial observations and questions. First, the legend should hopefully make at least a cursory review of the Life Calendar possible by anyone (those who know me well will probably have a bit easier of a time figuring out what exactly is what – I’ve admittedly done a lot of different things in the first 33 years of my life and kept the categories fairly general as a result). In each week’s box, only the top half is coloured in. This represents the “primary activity” I was doing that week (put another way, that week what was my most likely answer to the question “what do you do?”) – more on what, if anything, I will do with the bottom half of each square later. Along the far right side you will see city names. Those specify which city I lived in for the majority of that year of my life (every year had a pretty clear winner). I had considered colouring in the the gaps between boxes to indicate different cities lived, but I was not only running out of colours but also worried that it would make the whole calendar less legible. I did try the grey border around the two times I lived outside of Canada…not sure how well that worked in the end.

I’m still taking this in and what it means. It really is powerful to see one’s entire life graphically represented at a glance like this. A few initial things that jumped out at me:

The sheer volume of my life to date that is taken up by formal education of some type is surprisingly large to me

I was also surprised by how much of my professional life was spent working in politics in one form or another (perhaps because it feels like it was a long time ago) – it’s actually under-represented on this version; more on that later

While 20 of my 33 years I have lived in Saskatoon, only 2 of those were as an adult, if we use the age of 18 as the definition of adulthood (debatable, I know). Of my 15 “adult” years, 10 of them have been in Ottawa, 2 in Saskatoon, 2 in Boston, 1 in Washington DC

There are only two significant gaps in my Life Calendar in my adult life where there was no “primary” activity: 9 weeks in my 23rd year and 8 weeks in my 29th year (there was also a bit of a “slump” period of about 12 weeks in the later half of my 26th year, but using the methodology I’ve chosen it doesn’t really show up as such). I remember those gaps being filled with anxiety trying to answer the question “what’s next?”, and for the most part being not particularly pleasant periods of my life

In my mind this is not yet a finished product and I’d love some feedback to help get it there. Keeping the scope purely to my professional life, there are a few notable absences given the methodology I’m using that are significant parts of my life story (e.g. my work on Parliament Hill during all four years of my undergraduate degree, my work last year on getting my tech startup company off the ground). Should I use the bottom half of squares to colour in areas where there were important “secondary” activities in my life? Beyond that, should I try capture non-professional/educational aspects of my life? If so, how and which ones (e.g. significant trips, relationships, specific milestones)?

I hope this post doesn’t come across as too much naval-gazing but is taken in the spirit in which it is intended: a mix of geekish interest in effectively visualizing complex systems and personal self-reflection.

Even after all the promises you’ve broken to yourself,All will be well. You can ask me how but only time will tell.– “All Will Be Well” by The Gabe Dixon Band

There is something deep in the human psyche that makes us inclined to want to celebrate and reflect on anniversaries that end in 0s or 5s. It’s not clear to me if this is a biological imperative or driven more by cultural influences, but regardless of the cause it remains a fact of life.

This week I was back home in Saskatchewan, in part to celebrate a round number anniversary. In this case that of a very special person in my life, my Baba Mabel Androsoff who turned 90 on June 6th.

After a family dinner we had at her home in Blaine Lake in honour of her birthday, we decided to watch the video of her 65th birthday party. This was one of the first major family events that I have any significant memory of. As I sat there watching the parade of faces, many of whom have now left us, a realization started to wash over me. The images I were seeing were from 25 years ago. Mental math ensued. Then it hit me: in this video, my parents are the same age that I am now. A strange feeling started to grow in the pit of my stomach, which I struggled to articulate.

Later that evening I was driving back to Saskatoon and decided to take a bit of a scenic detour through the north end of Saskatoon where early in my career I lived and worked. As I was driving a second realization washed over me. Exactly 10 years ago I was in the midst of a particularly monumental period in my life. That 12 month period from September 2003 to September 2004 would set in motion much of the next decade of my professional and personal life. I could viscerally recall exactly what I was doing 10 years ago in June of 2004 and how the shadows of that time in my life still linger in unexpected ways. That same unarticulated feeling came back.

As I sit here writing this, I can tell you what that feeling isn’t. It isn’t a feeling of being old. It isn’t a feeling of regret. It isn’t even a feeling of nostalgia. Perhaps I can best describe what it is as vertigo brought on by a sudden loss of a frame of reference. In that feeling may also lie the reason as to why we have such a strong attachment to round number anniversaries – after all, one of the ways to treat motion sickness is to focus on a fixed spot on the horizon.

Last spring I co-founded a tech startup company called Beyond 2.0. Our mission: to build innovative products and services based on open data. Around the same time I was returning from language training to Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) where I was taking on a new challenge managing the team that runs the Government of Canada’s internal collaborative platforms, GCpedia and GCconnex. I was putting in long hours with my public service job, while my early mornings, late nights and weekends were filled with trying to get the start-up off the ground. This was never going to be a sustainable arrangement in the long run and I had given myself a year to pursue both paths and make a decision as to if I would stay in the public service or leave to run the startup full time.

As I was going through this journey something very interesting became apparent to me: most people in my life were rooting for me to leave government and take the startup path. Friends, family, and colleagues alike. Over the course of that year whenever I would go to social events, family get-togethers, or catch-ups with professional contacts, when I would tell them what I was doing with Beyond 2.0 their eyes would light up. They had a million ideas. They had people I needed to talk to. They would send me articles they clipped from newspapers or tell me about the latest episode of Dragon’s Den or Shark Tank I needed to watch. They were all rooting for me, and it was a great feeling.

Yet here is the rub: by any reasonable measure of contribution to the public good and society at large, my work as a public servant is at least an order of magnitude more important and impactful. My team and I are putting in place some of the infrastructure that will enable government to stay relevant and agile in a modern networked world. We are empowering public servants to find and connect with each other in ways they simply couldn’t do a few years ago. We’ve grown our internal collaboration ecosystem beyond just the early adopters and tech enthusiasts and now have tens of thousands of mainstream public servants logging on to these social networking and collaboration tools for the first time. These are big moves that will have impacts on the public service for years to come in ways we can’t even envision right now. For our work my team and I won the TBS Award of Merit last year. Yet for most people in my life, all they really wanted to know for the past year was what was happening with the startup and how soon I was going to leave government.

Recently I had the great pleasure of being back on the Harvard Kennedy School campus to take part in the IDEASpHERE conference. One of the sessions I attended was a discussion by my former thesis advisor Nicco Mele, whom I have known since my time at the Kennedy School and whose work I follow closely, and fellow communications and internet innovator Morra Aarons Mele who I had the great pleasure of meeting for the first time. During their panel about the “promise and peril of the internet” Morra started a great discussion about what she termed “entrepreneurship porn”, namely how the excessive value that our society is putting on startup culture is causing a serious brain drain for traditional institutions like government.

It clicked for me during her talk that I had been living this exact scenario for the past year. Moreover, I am not alone. In the four years since I moved back to Ottawa to join the federal public service I have met countless passionate, dedicated, innovative public servants who to their very core want to improve how government works and serve the public. Yet almost to a person, they are battling a constant crisis of faith in a public service career and considering if they can accomplish more or be more fulfilled working outside of “the system”. Much has been said about the challenges with government HR processes to recruit and retain talent, and those issues are still as valid as ever and need to be addressed. But what is now becoming clearer to me in a very personal way is that at the same time we also need to address the equally detrimental stigma that exists around working for government. The poisonous attitude that I hear from far too many, even from those in the public service itself, which says anyone who is good at what they do wouldn’t be working for government.

As the session with Morra and Nicco wrapped up, we started talking about where we go from here. One concrete idea was the notion of encouraging public sector entrepreneurship, specifically allowing startup-type organizations to be born, grow and, sometimes, fail inside of government itself. As a friend of mine later put it, creating (and in some cases preserving) enclaves of awesomeness. There are of course numerous other ideas and initiatives that need to be part of this conversation, but what I do know is that this is a conversation that we need to start having. I’m encouraged that the recent Destination 2020 report recognized this in the recommendation to shape the brand of the public service. This is critically important for anyone who cares about public policy, because the alternative is that we run the risk of losing a generation of our best and brightest public servants to the pursuit of building better click-bate.